Stewards of the Flame (38 page)

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41
 
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Because even in desperation Valerie had remembered her promise not to name Peter, her suicide note was dismissed by the authorities as an irrational outburst of a sick mind. No one bothered to wonder what she had meant by it. Peter, however, was called to account by the department head, Warick, who as her current doctor was blamed for not having put her on suicide watch. Why, Warick demanded, had there been nothing on her chart about suicidal tendencies? This Peter could answer with complete honesty: Valerie had not been suicidal at the time he was treating her. Depressed though she’d been, she had never given any indication that she might take her own life. Since nothing could be proved to the contrary, and since Peter declared that the threat of more electroshock was enough to trigger suicide in anyone whose brain was already damaged by it, Warick was forced to let the matter drop. But the never-cordial relationship between the two had deteriorated into enmity.

There was no hope of the Group retrieving the body for burial, of course; it was still warm when found and had been sent immediately to the Vaults. Suicide was a felony in the eyes of the Meds, and the supercilious remarks made by news commentators on the Administration’s mercy in keeping perpetrators “alive” made Jesse want to vomit.

Carla was deeply shaken by Valerie’s death. At the Lodge, after a simple candlelight memorial service, she was finally able to talk about it. “I drove her to it,” she said miserably. “She was weakened by depression, and telepathically I convinced her that she would harm Peter if she was questioned.”

“Which she probably would have,” said Kira. “Tragic as it was, her death was what saved him, and at least some of the rest of us.”

“In the end, she wasn’t weak,” Peter said. “Make no mistake, I don’t condone suicide. It’s wrong, as the Group has always maintained. But it can be excused when the aim is to save others.”

“Even though she didn’t plan it rationally?” Carla protested. “It was an impulse that came from her fear of electroshock combined with the worse fear I implanted in her! She wasn’t in shape to know what she was doing.”

“She knew,” Peter replied gently. “Carla, I spared you the graphic details earlier, but it’s best that you know them now. People don’t die from slitting their wrists as easily as the public thinks—it’s often a mere gesture, a cry for help. Even if they’re not found quickly, the blood tends to clot before they bleed out. Valerie lost a lot of blood, fast, despite the fact that she had no sharp knife and needed effort, plus her pain management skill, to cut herself up with eating utensils. And that means she bled out deliberately.”

“Deliberately?” Jesse questioned.

“Our control over bleeding works both ways,” Kira told him. “Valerie evidently hadn’t forgotten her mind training.”

“It’s true that the aftereffects of electroshock predisposed her to suicide,” Peter admitted, “so that when faced with more such treatments, she welcomed the thought of dying. And I’d be the last to say that’s not a terrible thing. But we do her injustice if we assume she didn’t have free will.”

“That’s what you’ve always said about mental patients,” Carla recalled. “That their free will shouldn’t be denied by well-meaning caretakers.”

“Yes. Mental imbalance does not make people less than human. Warick, like the rest of the Meds, thinks anyone likely to commit suicide should be locked up for his or her own protection. He knows I disagree, so he’s convinced that I purposely failed to note it on Valerie’s chart. Ironically, I didn’t, though I did alter other things when I put through her discharge. She wasn’t in any sense suicidal until they arrested her the second time. But it’s true enough that I wouldn’t have recorded it if she had been, because nothing except danger to others can justify depriving patients of their human right to freedom.”

Carla frowned. “I don’t like the way Warick’s been bugging you.”

“There’s not much to like about Warick,” Peter agreed. “Unfortunately, he’s my boss, so I have to put up with him.”

“But he’s going to get suspicious someday—”

“Of what? He has no reason to guess I’ve done anything illegal; the worst he can do is fire me, and he hasn’t the power even for that without proof of misconduct.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Carla conceded. But later, to Jesse, she said, “Warick makes me nervous. I get a bad feeling whenever he and Peter have an argument.”

The next week, with the crisis past, Jesse began visiting the Group’s city healing house with Kira. It had long ago been determined that he lacked the natural talent to be trained as a healer. Self-healing of relatively minor conditions was as far as he would be able to go. He wanted to learn all he could by observing, however.

The healing house was merely a safe house to which Group members came with illness or injury not amenable to self-healing and to which members of the front group were occasionally directed. The latter could not, of course, be given spectacular treatment like the rapid healing of wounds, nor did they need it, since injured people didn’t hesitate to seek official care. Outsiders sought help only with problems the Hospital had been unable to cure. Back pain, undiagnosed stomach pain, headaches—these and other conditions brought on by stress were often severe and recurrent. Kira and others skilled in healing dealt with such problems telepathically, using mystical hocus-pocus as a facade.

“But can you trust the patients not to mention it to their doctors?” Jesse asked.

“Oh, yes—they’re afraid their mental health would be questioned if they let it be known they were involved in any kind of mysticism. And even if they did report us, what we do with outsiders isn’t illegal. We don’t call it treatment. If a safe house were compromised we’d simply close it and go elsewhere.”

The treatment Group members received
was
illegal. Though serious illness was rare among them, it did occasionally occur. Jesse was surprised to learn that even major surgery was done within the Group. But, he realized, it was not dangerous when no anesthetic was needed; surgical patients could remain awake, help to control their own bleeding, and afterward heal their own wounds. The Group included several skilled surgeons besides Susan Gerrold, the gynecologist who had operated on Valerie. Medical equipment was kept hidden in the city healing house for emergencies, though when possible members were taken to the Lodge.

With Carla, Jesse gradually developed his telepathic skill to the point where she pronounced him ready to learn how to relieve pain in others. He had seen it done by Kira in the healing house; people arrived in extreme pain and left free of it, for a time, when the healer, ostensibly, had done no more than touch them lightly. “It would be easier if we used a placebo or spoke of some mysterious form of energy,” Carla said, “just as healers have traditionally done on Earth. But as a matter of principle, we don’t want to encourage the notion that the cure is physical. Calling it prayer would also work, but we don’t want to encroach on anyone’s religion, or lack of religion. So we tell them the literal truth, that under our guidance their inner minds can free them of pain.”

Her explanation of how to guide was a bit frightening at first. You had to sense telepathically what the patient was experiencing and deliberately
not
turn off suffering until you felt it fully in your own body—a technique that had been practiced in ancient times by shamans. Then, and only then, could you go into the state where you didn’t mind pain, projecting into the patient’s mind the way in which you did so, carrying her along. Jesse perceived that this was what Peter had done in teaching him, and was uncertain of his own ability to manage it.

“It won’t be as hard as instructing,” Carla said, “because the patient doesn’t have to learn to do it herself. You suffer for only a brief time.” During that time, you would have to be absolutely calm and steady, he knew. Any fear or doubt in your mind would be passed to the patient, who would then be left in worse pain than before.

During their next offshift at the Lodge she took him to the lab to try it, with Ingrid as a volunteer victim under stimulus. He found it easier than he expected to wait before banishing pain. When he knew he
could
banish it, the pain he shared with Ingrid didn’t seem bad. And of course, that was what Peter had told him in the first place: the fear of losing control was much worse than pain itself. He could sense that the relief, when it came, had been initiated by him—that Ingrid hadn’t cheated by using her own skill—and he found it a deeply moving experience.

Nevertheless, Carla was there to help and Ingrid had past experience with the state of not suffering. Jesse knew his own projection into her mind wouldn’t have worked if she’d been a frightened novice. He was not telepathically gifted, despite his new-found ability to communicate with other trained telepaths. A healer had to be able to project to untrained people.

And so he was back to the same dilemma: he was happy in the Group despite his ongoing fear for Carla, yet bored and restless with nothing to fill his days. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’m sure Peter has something important planned for you—otherwise he wouldn’t have declared that he doesn’t want you distracted by advanced training.”

This had come up during one of their first visits to the Island; to Jesse’s inner relief, Peter had overruled Greg’s suggestion that he should be progressing beyond mere refresher sessions in the lab. The question “distracted from what?” had not been answered. Jesse had supposed he was being given time to assimilate what he’d learned and apply it to daily living, an effort that since his Ritual transformation had become easier. That it might refer to an upcoming task had not occurred to him—but if it did, what was Peter waiting for?

“Right now,” Carla continued, “he’s too absorbed with Ian, and what Ian’s teaching him about taking over the leadership, to think about anything else. He doesn’t often seem to have his mind on his work at the Hospital.”

That must be it. Even at the Lodge, Peter was no longer the vibrant, carefree young man Jesse had first known there. Learning his true age had altered Jesse’s view of him, to be sure; still there was a real difference, which Carla too had noticed long before Valerie’s arrest and had mentioned more than once. Having met Ian, he could now see its source. Taking Ian’s place would demand all the strength and wisdom that Peter could muster.

Beside this, his own problem was insignificant, Jesse decided. In any case, there was nothing he could do but let it ride.

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42
 
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The city was built on the largest of Undine’s islands, which was long and narrow, with the spaceport and power plant occupying one end. The Hospital complex, containing the largest and tallest buildings in the colony, took up the high ground in the middle. The island’s other end, crisscrossed by canals, was tightly packed with businesses, apartments, and a few private houses. If the population grew any larger, it would have to expand to the neighboring islands now devoted to mines and farms.

The West Shore waterfront was where the private boats and seaplanes were moored. Peter kept his plane in the area closest to the Hospital, but moorings extended a long way toward the tip of the island, separated from a row of upscale homes by a wide esplanade. On a bright afternoon Jesse walked aimlessly along it, farther than he’d gone before, and to his surprise found himself in front of the house where he had been taken to meet Ian. It had been dark then, so he hadn’t noticed that it faced the water, but he was sure it was the same house. And, he recalled, he’d been told that the Group’s hospices were always located on the waterfront for the simple reason that bodies had to be surreptitiously moved from them into planes. Cost was not a factor; the Group had plenty of local money available to spend on real estate, the ownership of which was registered in the names of members who kept a low profile.

He did not, of course, go to the door; he knew that Ian needed rest and received few visitors. Though either Kira or some other caregiver would be there, his daytime loneliness was hardly an excuse for intruding. But he stopped and sat on the low concrete wall at the water’s edge, looking out at the brightly colored seaplanes and thinking that this was the only view Ian would ever see now. Ian must long to be aboard one of those planes, heading out over the sea toward his beloved Island . . . Jesse certainly did. He, even more than Carla, lived for the offshifts when they would be free to go there. Besides, the weekly flight itself was something he looked forward to, mere passenger though he now was. He did miss flying, though he’d never had opportunity to do as much as he’d have liked in shuttling between starships and spaceports.

There was a pier opposite the house with boats tied up, and a few shacks on it—the recharging station, water taxi office, and so forth. Idly, Jesse read the signs, noticing one that read “Seaplane for Charter.” On second glance he saw that beside the sign was a large “For Sale” notice.

Suddenly, Jesse knew what he was going to do with his time on Undine.

There was no reason he couldn’t run an air charter service. Now that the idea had come to him, he couldn’t imagine why he had not thought of it before. Surely he could learn to fly a seaplane easily, considering his experience piloting shuttles. He would enjoy it. He could set his own hours. And it would be of use to the Group; there were always more people wanting to go to the Island than planes available to take them. Peter’s willingness to arrange loans against his offworld accounts had so far appeared to be unlimited. He could buy the plane and charter business outright without making much of a dent in his retirement funds.

Eager to get started, Jesse proceeded along the pier to the shack with the sign. Not until he’d pushed the door open did he remember that he knew nothing about financial transactions in the colony beyond the fact that they were strictly regulated. Probably he should have asked Peter’s advice, lest government red tape jeopardize the secrecy of his funds’ true source. But what the hell, it would do no harm to inquire about the price.